Co-isolation, Anybody?

Over at her blog, The Medium, at NYT, Virginia Heffernan recently reminded us about cybercafes. Not really a predecessor to coworking spaces, these were places early adopter geeks could go and do their private virtual whatever in a public space. It wasn’t about collaboration or networking. It was about emailing in one another’s presence.

Heffernan mentions @cafe as an example—a place in Manhattan where I was once booked—in 1995!— by Prodigy Services (anybody remember Prodigy?!) to do a reading. (It was Prodigy’s hope, at the time, to launch a cyber-celeb into the world. Such heady times!) Well @cafe is long shuttered. But Heffernan reports that cyber cafes still exist out there and have morphed some.

Now, when I think of such places, I think of traveling far away without a laptop, and tracking down a badly carpeted drab room where I rent a beat up, buggy computer for too much per minute to check my email. Or feeling some small sense of comfort if my son is traipsing around Europe, knowing he’ll have ample access to cybercafes to send back reports of how “pretty” Amsterdam is. These images I have of cybercafes aren’t inaccurate. However, they don’t paint the full picture.

Here’s a bit from Heffernan’s blog, within which is a quote from 1998, pointing out why cybercafes should, logically, be obsolete by now:

“The notion of a cybercafe — a place for Net surfers to socialize on a tide of gourmet coffee — is at odds with how most people want to use computers, even in their leisure time,” Michel Marriott observed that year [1998] in The New York Times. “Those who Web surf, read e-mail, write or program or do just about anything else on a computer often do so in solitude.” Today, with superpowered handhelds, we imagine digital life as something that no longer requires devoted surfaces, mouse pads or uninterrupted stretches of time.

And yet, still some gather in cybercafes. Heffernan tells the tale of Web2Zone, near the campus of NYU, where more than half of the space is dedicated to gamers. Technically, these gamers have no real need to come and play amongst each other — unless they’re having a hardware crisis at home. But the café’s owner has a number of theories why they do choose to congregate. Heffernan has ideas of her own, too:

Participants in social networks and any kind of massive-multiplayer-online existence often feel suspended between total isolation at their screens and howling online crowds. The next incarnation of the cybercafe should take into account that people will pay not only for coffee and online minutes but also for the reassurance that in their cyberjourneys they might find traveling companions whose faces — in line for a Red Bull or a margarita? — they might even see.